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Of course you all heard about LinkedIn, the social platform for professional networking and how important is to be there in order to be head-hunt at some point. Today I was reading IJNet, and I found this article about a free tool of LinkedIn and I want to share it with you.

To make LinkedIn work, though, you need to do more than post a resume. Recommend others, post questions, answer them, build a strong network and your visibility will rise. With visibility comes opportunity.

Signal

One of LinkedIn’s cool, free tools is Signal, which helps LinkedIn users extract more value from the growing amount of content on the careers site and Twitter accounts by helping users slice and dice a tsunamic newsfeed down to a stream they actually can use.

It works like this: There is a “Search Updates” window just under the “What should your network know?” window near the top of the screen. Type in the term you are interested in, and LinkedIn will extract all the relevant messages from its general newsfeed. With 70 million users in 150 industries, there is a lot in that general feed.

When you click after the search term, it will open up a three column-page with the selected posts running down the main central column. Headlines on that subject, passed along by others, are in the right rail. The left rail lets you refine your search further.

For example, you can ask LinkedIn Signal to serve up posts by people in an industry, such as newspapers or television, who mention “job opening.” LinkedIn shows how closely you are connected to those people, where they work and, with another sort, who else they work with.

You can see what people at one company are saying about another. For example, I looked up what people at The New York Times were saying about Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily.

A freelancer can use Signal to see what the buzz is in a particular industry, and sources with contact information will be right there in the search.

Someone going off on a job interview easily could ask Signal what people in that company are commenting about, check their profiles and get a good sense of what is on the minds of the people and take that knowledge into the interview.

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We have to agree that it is not easy to get a job, especially when you are a recent graduate student with little or no experience in the domain you want.

Check this email:

Dear Evil HR Lady,

I’m a recent college graduate and have been actively job hunting for about 6 months. As the number of resumes I’ve sent out approaches 300, I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong and how I can stand out among the hundreds of other applicants I’m competing with. After Googling “creative ways to get hired”, I came across the idea of wearing a t-shirt with my resume on it. My dream job is to do PR in the racing industry. I’m attending two races in the coming months and I am contemplating doing this in order to get the attention of some race teams and potential hiring managers. Would you recommend wearing a resume t-shirt or does it come across as too desperate?